Since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, the economic and health impacts have been well studied and widely shared throughout the U.S. However, there is also a rising education disparity product of this crisis that needs to be among the top priorities for policymakers.
Education disparities in the U.S. trace back centuries back to the enslavement period when African-Americans were forbidden by law to receive an education. Since then, Jim Crow laws and redlining practices served to keep schools segregated, impacting the opportunities for many children. Before schools closed in March, according to McKinsey & Co., the average Black or Hispanic student remained approximately two years behind the average white one.
The education-achievement gap was first identified in 1966, and the delay in closing it costs the United States billions of dollars each year. During the Great Recession, McKinsey estimated that “the gap between white students and black and Hispanic ones deprived the U.S. economy of $310 billion to $525 billion a year in productivity, equivalent to 2 to 4 percent of GDP.” Eleven years later, they calculate that, had this gap been closed in 2009, today’s GDP would have been $426 to $705 billion higher.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in the country.
“Covid-19 has put [education] disparities into sharper relief and exacerbated them,” former Secretary of Education John B. King, Jr. said during Brooking’s event Education and structural inequalities during COVID-19—How do Finland and the U.S. compare? on June 25. He explained how the digital divide severely impacted distance-learning for African-Americans and Latinos. While 79% of white households have Internet access, only about 66% of Black families and 61% of Latino do so. Moreover, each student needs a device to access their online education, which is not the case in low-income families.
Furthermore, Secretary King detailed how low-resource school districts had trouble rapidly adapting to ensure distance-learning was good and engaging for African-American and Latino communities. Parents in these communities are less well-positioned to support their kids learning during the school day since only about one-in-five African-Americans and one-in-six Latinos can work from home. And, exceeding the fact that online learning is not as effective in academic achievement as in-person learning, Education Week’s Staff reported that 28 states, with around 48 percent of K–12 students, had not mandated distance learning as of April.
In McKinsey’s June article “COVID-19 and student learning in the United States: The hurt could last a lifetime,” they explained their three epidemiological scenarios, which they used to calculate the education and economic impacts. If their middle scenario turns out to be right and in-school instruction does not completely resume before January 2021, “Black students may fall behind by 10.3 months, Hispanic students by 9.2 months, and low-income students by more than a year.”
In addition to the worsening of learning gaps, both Secretary King and McKinsey partners worry that the high school drop-out rates will increase. As witnessed after natural disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina and Maria, when 14 to 20 percent of students never returned to school, McKinsey estimates that “an additional 2 to 9 percent of high-school students could drop out due to the coronavirus and associated school closures.” Currently, 6.5 percent of Hispanic and 5.5 of Black students drop-out of high school.
The devastating economic crisis has impacted state and local revenues that keep public schools running. Therefore, Secretary King says that the school districts are ‘rightly’ scared that they may see 15 to 20% budget cuts for the upcoming school year. McKinsey further reported that these “cuts to K–12 education are likely to hit low-income and racial- and ethnic-minority students disproportionately.”
It is imperative to pay attention to education, as it impacts the students’ possible lifetime earnings. McKinsey estimates that the average Hispanic K–12 student in the United States could earn $1,809 a year less (a 3.0 percent reduction) over a 40-year working life as a result of COVID-19–related learning losses, compared to $1,348 for white students. Furthermore, they highlight that “multiple studies have linked greater educational attainment to improved health, reduced crime and incarceration levels, and increased political participation.”
Some states are answering to the data. “Tennessee, for example, is recruiting 1,000 college students to tutor kids falling behind,” reported McKinsey. They also mention the case of New York, which will offer remote summer school for 177,700 students (compared with 44,000 in 2019). In previous years summer was a time when learning stopped; however, “some districts are making digital summer learning available (though optional) to all students.”
The digital divide remains. One of the things that worries Secretary King the most about the new school year is being in the same place as the schools around the country were in March. “Some schools will have to be hybrid, and others will continue to offer distance-learning because of the uptick in the pandemic, and we can’t be in the same place. We have to make sure that every kid has a device, every family has internet access, and every teacher has the professional development they need to teach via distance-learning effectively.”